Showcasing the Best of Manga and Graphic Novels: The Yen Press Website Transformation

Yen Press, North America’s largest comics publisher, has been dominating the comics industry for over 15 years.

With a vast catalog of over 3,000 titles, including some of the most iconic Japanese manga, Korean comics, and original graphic novel series, Yen Press is committed to bringing a wide range of stories to its audience and to collaborating with creators to share their work with fans worldwide.

The Opportunity

With a rapidly growing digital world, Yen Press realized the need to revamp their website to better showcase their extensive catalog and provide a smooth user experience. The publishing house wanted a website that is easy to navigate and manage, with a primary focus on their authors’ work rather than their brand. Yen Press wanted a platform that could cater to a broad audience between the ages of 13 to 30, including passionate collectors, book lovers, and teenagers fascinated with manga stories.

What eDesign Interactive Did

The eDesign Interactive team took on the challenge of redesigning Yen Press’s website, with a focus on providing an intuitive user experience and visually appealing design. They leveraged their expertise in digital marketing and development to create a minimalistic website that highlights the artwork of each title and allows fans to find their content quickly among thousands of genres, titles, series, and art styles published by Yen Press.

To cater to the target audience, eDesign Interactive developed a user-friendly calendar that highlights upcoming book releases and allows Yen Press to advertise new stories. They also implemented a daily automatic update feature that adds new book titles to the platform every day. Their SEO efforts were meticulous, redirecting each page to ensure Google’s rankings remain high. eDesign Interactive also created a career section to help Yen Press attract talented individuals.

The back-end development team managed monumental feeds of data from the book publisher into the website, resulting in a powerful showcase of their development capabilities. Custom solutions, including a custom image manipulation tool and a custom tool for importing huge collections of books, were developed to manage the massive amount of content. Their due diligence and QA process was extensive and tedious, ensuring that all title data and ISBN information were accurate. The site launched with over 11,000 pages, making it one of the most extensive sites in the industry.

The website is built on the latest CakePHP and ElasticSearch, making it incredibly responsive and fast despite the colossal amount of visuals and information. It is mobile-first, ensuring that users can access it seamlessly from any device. eDesign Interactive also incorporated a blog section for Yen Press to post articles tagged to specific titles, and there are additional features and functionalities still in development, such as a PDF book previewer and the ability to sell titles directly from the website. Monthly web maintenance and enhancements, as well as SEO strategy, are also ongoing.

How It Went

The revamped website resulted in a 50% increase in traffic within the first month of launch, making it a massive success. Yen Press is thrilled with the new design, which allows them to manage their content seamlessly and showcase their catalog to their broad audience. Their development team’s custom solutions ensured that the site launched with accurate data and smooth functionality. Yen Press’s target audience responded positively to the website’s user-friendly experience, resulting in increased engagement and conversions.
Overall, the website was a massive success, and they were delighted to have had the opportunity to work with Yen Press on this project. eDesign Interactive are confident that the revamped website will continue to drive traffic and engagement, helping Yen Press maintain its position as North America’s largest manga publisher.

The Role

• Web Design
• UX/UI Design
• Front-End Development
• Database Architecture
• Back-end Programming
• Motion Graphics
• Project Management
• Web Animation
• Third-party Integrations
• GDPR Compliance
• SEO

About eDesign Interactive

eDesign Interactive is a digital experience agency headquartered in Morristown, NJ. Founded in 2004. They design dazzling websites, digital strategies, and interactive campaigns.